The Ducks won their seventh consecutive game and prevailed for the 17th time in their last 18 contests as they improved their NHL-leading record to 35-8-5. Their goaltender, Jonas Hiller, extended his club-record winning streak to 14 consecutive games with a flawless performance.

Ho-hum? Same old, same old?

No and no.

The Ducks’ 1-0 victory Sunday over the Detroit Red Wings at the Honda Center was something completely new for them. It was a grinding, methodical and out-of-character win over an injury-depleted team bent on keeping things close to the vest.

Andrew Cogliano scored the game’s only goal off a alert centering pass from a hard-charging Saku Koivu, at 12:42 of the second period. The Ducks then ditched their usual method of operation and ceased trading scoring chances and adopted a defense-first strategy.

There was no fast-break hockey for the Ducks.

Preserving a one-goal lead is how teams win during the Stanley Cup playoffs, and the Ducks did a fine job of turning away the Red Wings in the game’s closing minutes. Hiller made 22 saves for his third shutout of the season and 19th of his career.

Hiller’s 14-game winning streak also tied several players, most recently Tom Barrasso of the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1992-93, for the second-longest in league history. The Boston Bruins’ Gilles Gilbert won 17 in a row in 1975-76.

“It was a good game, a tight game, a playoff-type game, I thought,” Hiller said. “Not too many scoring chances on either end. Definitely happy to get away with a win. It’s definitely great to get a game with no goals against, but it’s the win that I enjoy the most.”

With leading scorer Ryan Getzlaf sidelined by a lower-body injury suffered during a 5-3 victory Saturday at Phoenix, the Ducks shifted into a different mode of operation. The Red Wings’ also pushed them in a new direction with a departure from their usual free-skating game.

The Red Wings went into Sunday’s game with 180 man-games lost and took on the Ducks without Daniel Alfredsson, Pavel Datsyuk, Jonathan Ericsson, Johan Franzen, Jonas Gustavsson, Darren Helm and Stephen Weiss because of assorted injuries.

“It shows we can win in different ways,” said Cogliano, who scored his 15th goal, three shy of his career high set with the Edmonton Oilers in 2007-08 and duplicated the next season. “When it comes down to it, we have guys who are willing to pay the price and get the job done.”

There was some question about that after the Ducks squandered a 3-2 opening-round playoff series lead and lost to the Red Wings last spring. The Ducks, however, continue to answer questions about their fitness as potential Stanley Cup champions with each victory.

Cogliano, Koivu and Jakob Silfverberg epitomized the Ducks’ workman-like approach against Detroit. Their marching orders were to neutralize Henrik Zetterberg, the Red Wings’ leading scorer and perhaps the lone threat in their patchwork lineup.

The Ducks’ so-called checking line did that and also produced the game’s only goal.

“These are the types of games that our team has to learn how to win,” Koivu said. “Good defensively, maybe not playing our best but scoring enough goals to win. This one felt good. It probably wasn’t very pretty. It was a very different game than we were used to.”

Elliott Teaford is an award-winning hockey reporter based in Southern California who covered the L.A. Kings when they won the Stanley Cup in 2012 and in '14, and the Anaheim Ducks' Cup win in 2007. He grew up playing outdoors on the streets of Philadelphia. He also watched the Flyers bully their way to consecutive Stanley Cups in the 1970s, and makes no excuses for their quasi-legal play.

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